Ray Lewis - Dominant Playmaker of His Era

No one needs statistical analysis to tell us Ray Lewis is an all-time great. A case has been made that he was the greatest linebacker of all time. Until this season, possibly his last, he showed little signs of aging. But age and a triceps tear may now have ended his amazing career.

Ray Lewis is the kind of player you absolutely need to watch with your own eyes to appreciate  Stats, advanced or otherwise, do him no justice. If you ever get the opportunity, watch the replays of the 2000 season's Super Bowl or any game from that year. Ray Lewis was super-humanly fast and powerful.

As a fan who'd watched more than his share of football, I was trained to expect patterns. Here's the same old hand off up the middle, RB sees a hole, cuts, 5 yard gain. Pitch to the outside, RB tries to turn the corner, squeezes around the DE, turns up field, might break off a big run if he can shake a tackler. Play action, 10-yd pass to the TE over the middle. Let's face it. A really big chunk of NFL football is predictably boring.

But watching Lewis at his peak confuses the brain. The rules and patterns of typical NFL plays that we expect to see were broken. Instead of RB sees a hole, cuts, 5 yard gain--it's RB sees a hole, cuts, 5-yd...OH MY EVERLIVING GOD! WHAT THE F?!! JESUS HAVE MERCY. WHAT WAS THAT?!!! Ray Lewis just penetrated from the back side of the play and dragged down the RB from behind for a 2-yd loss.

You know those video games like Madden football that usually have some sort of 'cheat code' that allows players to dial in invincibility or supernatural speed and strength attributes to their game characters? At his peak, Lewis was just like that. Lewis had the cheat code of reality in his DNA.

Although numbers aren't required, that's never stopped us before. So here are +EPA numbers for the top producing LBs of the NFL digital era. (Data begins in 2000). Except for the column on the far right, all numbers are per game averages. The right-most column is the player's grand total for the era.

Although this doesn't show us career numbers before 2000, they still show how dominant and consistent Lewis was among his peers. Even well into his mid-thirties, he was among the very top play-makers.

Weekly Game Probabilities

Game probabilities for week 7 are up at the New York Times' Fifth Down.

This week I look at the the showdown between the AFC leading Ravens and Texans.

Washington Post: All About Home Field Advantage

Following a Redskins win that broke an eight-game home losing streak, this week's article at the Post looks at home field advantage and its causes.

Home advantage is universal in sports. Whether it’s a team or individual sport, professional or amateur, virtually all athletic competitions have a home advantage. Fans like to believe they are the cause. Communication is essential in football, audibles and snap counts being the most obvious. The players themselves tell us it makes a difference. As plausible as this explanation may seem, the evidence suggests home advantage does not come from the crowd.

Game Changers: Dez Drops the Ball

The Situation
Dallas at Baltimore, Week 6
4th Q
Ravens lead 31-29
Dallas ball; 2 point conversion attempt

Anatomy of a Comeback: Denver Takes Down San Diego

With 5:02 left in the third quarter Monday night, Philip Rivers threw incomplete to Dante Rosario on second and eight. Maybe this drive would stall, but the Chargers held a 24-7 lead and the time to pull together a comeback appeared to be running out on the Broncos. Denver held just a 0.03 win probability, after all.

Of course, on the next play Elvis Dumervil strip-sacked Rivers, Tony Carter picked up the loose ball and 32 yards later and an extra point later it was 24-7 Chargers. Seemingly just as soon it was 24-14, and 24-21, and 28-24, and 35-24. And then game over. How did the Broncos, so utterly dominated in the games first 40 minutes, come back to take home the victory (and with it, the top spot in our efficiency ratings)?

Game Changers: Rivers Nails His Own Coffin

The Situation
Broncos at Chargers, Week 6
3rd Q, 11:29 to go
Chargers lead 24-21
Chargers ball; 3rd and 8 from their own 31

Win Probability, In Color!

Nothing new here. I just thought this looked cool. It's the win probability of an offense with a first down trailing by 3 points. Actually, it is a little new. I'm trying to get smart on multivariate non-parametric kernel smoothing algorithms using R, the open source statistics package. That's just a fancy way of filtering out the noise inherent in the raw data and making a smooth estimate of the true probabilities. This chart is a product of my experimentation.

This axis going from 5-95 represent the midpoint of 10-yard bins of field position. The axis labeled 0-50 represent the game time remaining. The z-axis (vertical) shows the expected win probability. It's a little over-smoothed, at least in terms of field position. It might be under-smoothed in terms of time. Still have a lot learn.

Team Efficiency Rankings - Week 7

I know. I know. These rankings make no sense to me either. Then again, last week the conventional favorites according to closing spreads went 5-9 while the game probabilities generated by the efficiency model went 8-6. (The NE-SEA game came up as a .50/.50 game, and I foolishly dug down to the third decimal place to make NE the favorite. Otherwise it might have been 8-5.)

The one thing the popped out at me was BAL falling to 17th. Everyone else has them as a top 5 team. At 5-1, their record certainly makes them look that way, tied for best in the AFC. But they are 3 simple game-deciding plays from being 2-4 and another 3 points from being 1-5: Tucker's squeaker of a FG vs NE, DAL's missed FG last week, and an incomplete Weeden pass into the endzone. Plus, they barely survived KC, winning 9-6 in a game in which they were mostly outplayed. Even before their recent injuries on defense, I think they've been generally overrated.

ATL is another curiosity. Despite having the best record in the NFL, they are 10th here. They have an average passing attack and they can't run the ball. Plus they have an average pass defense except for a very high interception rate which is bound the regress sharply.

NYG and GB are the top up-movers this week, thanks to beat-downs of top-ranked opponents on Sunday.

Here are your rankings for week 7. Click on the table headers to sort. The efficiency stats that comprise the inputs of the model are shown below.